General Norman Schwarzkopf was a big and very strong man, physically, mentally, and morally. But he would have been more, or perhaps less, than human if the sheer strain of those last few days had not begun to tell on him.
He had been working up to twenty hours a day for six months without a break. He had not only overseen the biggest and the fastest military buildup in history, a task that alone could have broken a lesser man, but he had coped with the complexities of relationships with the sensitivities of Saudi society, kept the peace when a dozen times internecine feuding could have wrecked the Coalition, and warded off endless well-meant but useless and exhausting interventions from Capitol Hill.
And yet it was not all this that disturbed his much-needed sleep in those last few days. It was the sheer responsibility of being in charge of all those young lives that brought the nightmare.
In the nightmare, there was the Triangle. Always the Triangle. It was a right-angled triangle of land, lying on its side. What would have been the base of the triangle was the coastline from Khafji down past Jubail to the three linked cities of Dammam, Al Khoba, and Dhahran.
The perpendicular line of the triangle was the border running west from the coast, first between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, then on into the desert to become the Iraqi border.
The hypotenuse was the slanting line linking the last western outpost in the desert to the coast at Dhahran.
Within that triangle almost half a million young men and women sat and waited for his order. Eighty percent of them were Americans. In the east were the Saudis, other Arab contingents, and the Marines.
In the center were the great American armored and mechanized infantry units, and among them was the British First Armoured Division. On the extreme flank were the French.
Once, the nightmare had been tens of thousands of young men pouring into the breeches for the attack, to be soaked by a rain of poison gas and to die there between the sand walls and the razor wire. Now it was worse.
Only a week earlier, contemplating the triangle on a battle map, an Army intelligence officer had actually suggested, “Maybe Saddam intends to pop a nuke in there.” The man thought he was joking.
That night, the commanding general tried again to sleep and failed. Always the Triangle. Too many men, too small a space.
At the SIS villa, Laing, Paxman, and the two radio technicians shared a crate of beer brought covertly from the British embassy. They too studied the map; they too saw the Triangle. They too felt the strain.
“One bloody bomb, one fucking small, crude, first-attempt sub-Hiroshima bomb in there, air burst or ground burst ...,” said Laing.
They did not need to be scientists to know that the first explosion would kill more than a hundred thousand young soldiers. Within hours, the radiation cloud, sucking up billions of tons of active sand from the desert, would begin to drift, covering everything in its path with death.
The ships at sea would have time to batten down, but not the ground troops or the people of the Saudi cities. Eastward it would drift, widening as it went, over Bahrain and the Allied airfields, poisoning the sea, across to the coast of Iran, there to exterminate one of the categories Saddam Hussein had pronounced to be unworthy of life—“Persians, Jews, and flies.”
“He can’t bloody launch it,” said Paxman. “He hasn’t a rocket or plane that can do it.”
Far to the north, hidden in the Jebal al Hamreen, deep inside the breech of a gun with a barrel one hundred and eighty meters long and a range of a thousand kilometers, the Fist of God lay inert but ready to be called to fly.
The house in Qadisiyah was only half awake and quite unprepared for the visitors who came at dawn.
When the owner had built it many years before, it had been set in the midst of orchards. It stood three miles away from the four villas in Mansour that Major Zayeed of Counterintelligence was even then preparing to put under surveillance. The spread of the southwestern suburbs of Baghdad had enveloped the old house, and the new Qadisiyah Expressway roared through what had once been fields growing peaches and apricots.
Still, it was a fine house, owned by a prosperous man now long retired, walled within its grounds and still retaining some fruit trees at the bottom of the garden.
There were two truckloads of AMAM soldiers under the command of a major, and they did not stand on ceremony. The lock of the main gate was shot off, the gate kicked open, and the soldiers poured in, smashing the front door and beating the decrepit servant who tried to stop them.
They ran through the house, ripping open cupboards and tearing down hangings, while the terrified old man who owned the house tried to shield and protect his wife.
The soldiers stripped the place almost bare and found nothing. When the old man pleaded with them to say what it was they wanted or sought, the major roughly told him he knew perfectly well, and the search went on.
After the house, the soldiers tried the garden. It was at the bottom near the wall that they found the freshly turned earth. Two of them held the old man while the soldiers dug. He protested he did not know why the earth was freshly turned; he had buried nothing. But they found it all the same.
It was in a burlap sack and all could see, when they emptied it out, that it was a radio set.
The major knew nothing of radio sets, nor would he have cared, had he known, that the broken-down Morse-sender model in the burlap bag was a world away from the ultramodern satellite-based transmitter used by Mike Martin and still beneath the floor of his shack in First Secretary Kulikov’s garden. For the AMAM major, radios were the tricks of spies, and that was all that mattered.
The old man began to wail that he had never seen it before, that someone must have come over the wall in the night to bury it there, but the AMAM soldiers knocked him down with their rifle butts, and his wife also when she screamed.
The major examined the trophy, and even he could see that some hieroglyphics on the containing sack appeared to be characters in Hebrew.
They did not want the house servant or the old woman—just the man. He was over seventy, but they carried him out facedown, gripped at each ankle and wrist by four soldiers, and threw him in the back of one of the trucks like a sack of figs.
The major was happy. Acting on an anonymous tip, he had done his duty. His superiors would be pleased. This was not a case for the Abu Ghraib prison. He took his prisoner to the AMAM